Month: September 2014

Prime Min­is­ter Netanyahu pays Sir Win­ston Churchill a com­pli­ment (and this writer a small­er one), in his thanks for a gift of an inscribed copy of my book, Churchill In His Own Words, a col­lec­tion of 4000 anno­tat­ed quo­ta­tions (which Churchill real­ly said), along with a short appen­dix of the pop­u­lar apho­risms he nev­er said but which are fre­quent­ly cred­it­ed to him (Churchillian Drift).

The Prime Min­is­ter is not new to Churchill; he is one of those few states­men who pay more than rou­tine lip-ser­vice to Churchill’s role in his­to­ry. Unlike most lead­ers who invoke his name, Mr.…

but for adher­ence to the basic doc­trines of life, love and care described in Scrip­ture. Win­ston Churchill argued that the great goal of the Sec­ond World War was the sur­vival of what he called repeat­ed­ly “Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion.” Richard Lang­worth, a Churchill schol­ar, says that by “Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion” Churchill thought that Christianity’s “prin­ci­ples applied broad­ly to all of mankind regard­less of reli­gion.” Just as, to Churchill, the word “man” meant humankind, his allu­sions to Chris­tian­i­ty embod­ied prin­ci­ples he con­sid­ered “uni­ver­sal” and that “applied broad­ly to all mankind regard­less of reli­gion.”

This is all right as far as it goes, but it leaves out some of the essence.…

Writ­ing in the Ari­zona Repub­lic, Clay Thomp­son prop­er­ly cor­rects a read­er who believes it was Churchill who coined the phrase, “we shall squeeze Ger­many until the pips squeak” when he was “sec­re­tary of the navy.” Mr. Thomp­son cor­rect­ly replied that this was not Churchill but, among oth­ers, Sir Eric Camp­bell-Ged­des, who served as First Lord of the Admi­ral­ty (civil­ian head of the Navy) in 1917-19. The line has also been ascribed to Prime Min­is­ter David Lloyd George and oth­ers.

Churchill, as Thomp­son says, crit­i­cized this pol­i­cy in The World Cri­sis, his mem­oirs of World War I.…